


Anisoptera

by aderyn



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Dragonflies, art nouveau, bees & the battlefield, inscapes, sentinel species, sleep sleep sleep, we are what we are
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-09
Updated: 2012-08-09
Packaged: 2017-11-11 18:46:18
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,849
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/481685
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aderyn/pseuds/aderyn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Anax imperator,” says Sherlock.<br/>“Who?” says John.<br/>"Emperor Dragonfly," Sherlock says.<br/>*<br/>“What do you expect me to do? “says Sherlock from the bed’s edge.<br/>Not think about anything for two hours except the (iridescent) insides of your eyelids.<br/>Stay.<br/>Stop for a second; we may have days, months, years, but stop for minute.<br/>Lie down.<br/>Sleep.  (Let nothing catch fire.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Anisoptera

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you [professorfangirl](http://archiveofourown.org/users/lizeckhart/pseuds/professorfangirl), for making me think about bees and hummingbirds and logics, and for a lot of other things.

__ _"As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;  
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells  
Stones ring...  
_

_I say more: the just man justices;  
Keeps grace: that keeps all his goings graces_ _..."--Gerard Manley Hopkins_

 

“ _Anax imperator_ ,” says Sherlock.

“Who?” says John.

“Which,” says Sherlock,” or what. Sentient, though. Emperor Dragonfly. The British Dragonfly Society’s star of the month, widespread in southern England and Wales, recently appeared in Ireland."

“And to us?”

“Murderer from Kent,” says Sherlock, cheerfully. “Tattoos.”

“Huh,” says John.

Their shelves and walls hold some of that order, the Anisoptera, old specimens and prints alongside the Dodo, the Pileated Woodpecker, the Little Brown Bat; Sherlock sometimes sketches them,  the delicate lacework of wings, as he does the toes and beautiful nails of family Anatidae and the heartbreaking iridescence of Alcedinidae, the kingfishers, the bright barbules of their feathers. 

“What kind of tattoos?” John says.  Sherlock is already manic, ripping the curtains aside and flinging open the windows, letting the aerosphere in and out, stuffing his mobile into a too-close pocket, pulling it out again, pulling up images of shimmery flying gems (Azure Damselfly, Norfolk Hawker) and the sinuously curved winged things of Lalique and Mucha, holding his laptop in front of John’s face on the fly.

“Tattoos where?” says John. It’s not really the right question, but it seems important.

“Everywhere,” Sherlock says, “ DPhil in Chemical Ecology with a bit of a strange history. He killed his girlfriend and left her in a greenhouse."

“And we’re going to pick him up.”

“It’s all over but the weeping,” Sherlock says, and winks, hands John a set of crime scene photos and an Art Nouveau-style _Calopteryx virgo_ he’s sketched on the back of a receipt.

In the photos (somehow badly lit) the bruises on the girl’s (Lila, Lila W.) neck look like wings.  The world’s so tragically appropriate; we are what we are and we leave our traces, John thinks, and nips upstairs before they leave to slip Sherlock’s sketch into a drawer.

*******

Sherlock only draws things that are at least partially alive, or that were once, John thinks, things that are organic and blooded. Oh he’s sometimes drawn dead things; of course he has; he knows them well enough, bits of gravel from crime scenes, garden pea-stone, crystalline structures, but those always seem alive when he’s done.

 Once he sketched John’s fingers, holding them steady with one hand while he brought lines to life with the other.

“To what do I owe this?” John asked him.

“Your metacarpals are oddly angled, and your palm’s too warm,” Sherlock said, “Are you all right?

“Er, yes.  Is this art or science?”

“Both.  I do that sometimes, you know.”

When he’d finished John’s knuckles were wing-latticework and his fingernails blown glass, everything somehow light and transparent though Sherlock used the darkest pencil he could find.

*******

It’s not all over but the weeping.  The man with the dragonfly tattoos (oh, that _can’t_ be my blog entry title, not that, thinks John, on day two, when he still has his good humour; Sherlock will murder me in my sleep, or someone else will) takes them six days to pull from the wind, and Sherlock does not eat or sleep or even blink, and his ribs, especially, oddly, the upper pairs, seem to grow more prominent with each expiration.

On the bank of the River Lea, night three, (two old bicycles half-submerged ; what are we doing here?),  Sherlock, mad with the chase, deeply interested in the salinity of river-mud, or just  desperate for electrolytes,  scoops up a double handful of silty water and makes to drink it.

“What are you doing?”

 John takes his arm, swipes the dark smudges from his face with a sleeve. 

“I’m missing something; I’m missing something; I’m missing something,” Sherlock says, an invocation to the water and air, and no estuary, no flood, can contain him.

“Can’t,” Sherlock says.  River water drips from his wrists, his sleeves.

**_***_ **

“Dragonflies will die of fear in the presence of a predator,” Sherlock says, taking a sip of the water John’s handed him. He won’t accept anything else.

“Yes,” says John,”that happens to people too.”

“But they’re predators themselves,” Sherlock says, biting a nail, sitting forward on the sofa with his head in his hands, “…to butterflies, bees.”

“Sherlock,” says John.

There’s mud trapped under Sherlock’s fingernails, and he looks nervy and ill, his forearms alarming with twined veins and musculature-- but there’s still a little tick, a bright glint of remaining joy, in each iris.

What he does, thinks John, it’s what he does; what can he do but follow his genius? 

What I do, thinks John, is keep people from killing themselves, if I can, keep _him_ from killing himself…and oh, if he can, attend to this, remember it, from now on think of dragonflies when he recalls the Black Hawk, the Chinook medevac, the low buzz of the IRT’s with word of casualties out there in the darkness, the desert succulents with centers like atomic bees.

“You’re wrecked,” he says to Sherlock. “Lie down.”

“They live for two weeks,” Sherlock says.

*******

By the time Sherlock has a breakthrough, he looks like the air could take him. It’s nothing new, but it’s different somehow, expectant, another variant of alarm.

 When Lestrade arrests the dragonfly-man and brings him in, he’s quietly chanting his own name,

_“Gwas-y-neidr_ , ear-cutter, soul-weigher, snake-servant, eye-snatcher...”

Sherlock looks him in the eye.  They’re quite normal, his eyes, but for the rings of gold around the dark irides. His arms (Sherlock takes a sleeve, pushes it up) are a collage of wings.

“When I retire,” he says to Sherlock, quite civilly,”I’ll keep them all in a greenhouse, the Anisoptera.”

“Apocrita for me,” says Sherlock, with his arms safely behind his back again,”but I see the attraction.” 

“You won’t retire anywhere but to prison,” John says to Dragonfly, rather hotly.  (“Bees?” he mouths to Sherlock; he’s learnt his orders.)  Sherlock looks as though he might blow away, be lifted clear out of the squad room and cast into the aerosphere with his insects and birds, but still he peels off, paces the periphery while the Yarders toss him begrudging looks of admiration and Sally Donovan lets him sketch one of the tattoos from memory on a coffee-stained napkin, her eye-corners crinkling the tiniest bit despite themselves.

We are what we are and we leave our traces, John thinks, oh god, I need to sleep.

“You want to stay mate, have a drink later?” Lestrade says to him, “Was a tough one.”  He reaches over and tugs the back of John’s shirt down with some urgency. “Didn’t see that,” he says. “And neither did half the Met.”

“What, oh, thank you, “John says.  There’s the errant Browning heavy at his back, the low hum of exhaustion in his ears, his eye tracking Sherlock’s erratic vortices.  “But no. Got to get him home.”

Lestrade’s eyebrows don’t rise, not even a little.

*******

Sherlock cannot come down.

The windows he’s flung open won’t shut again, and the late summer wind blows through as he paces the flat.

_Fierceness is our beauty, is what we ought to long for_ , John types, makes a face at, deletes.  He can almost smell the salt, the marshes, but of course he can’t really; it’s central London, only pavement and petrol and a faint tang of something else.  Something, something, John thinks, dragonflies travelling aboard themselves like ultimatums…

Never given, thinks John, never given.  _Because I’d forgive you almost anything_. _(Beatings, druggings, sulks, liftoffs, subaquatic madness, the larval pull of  the mud, wings, wings,  wings, dehydration, self-immolation, drownings, disappearances, disembodied things, the heartbreaking beauty you gave my left hand. )_

He’s fired a gun in the past 24 hours and his hands are burning with the residue no-one will ever find. When he put the Browning back in the drawer he tucked Sherlock’s sketch, the Art Nouveau _C. virgo_ , under it, and looked sorrowfully down at his nails, steel-blue with grime.

*******

Sherlock cannot come down.

John finds him upright on the sofa, hands trembling, devouring an article about the applied mechanics of insect flight, asymmetric rowing and vortex shedding and optimization in order Odonata, the distinctive phase relation between wings.  

“There’s a distinct phase relation between the wings,” Sherlock says, holding up yet another article about the photonic iridescence of the Blue Banded Bee.

“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” he says, pointing to its picture. “Necessary."

“Yes,” says John.  And I would pay a lot, he thinks--though one cannot pay for these things, cannot have such a transactional relationship with the universe-- to hear you say that again. “But you need to come down.”

*******

The norfolk damselfly, blue, is extinct in Britain, as is the orange-spotted emerald…but the dainty damselfly reappeared after 57 years. We don’t see.--SH

The dragonflies of the early Cretaceous… downsized from their two-foot forebears--SH

Dragonflies in ecosystems that are coming back, secondary succession; they are a bellwether. How to decide what taxa?--SH

John  shakes his head, saves the texts, and thinks ,suddenly, of the graves at Gommecourt British Cemetery, where the men of the 56th London  rest, drawing the butterflies of spring; of a schoolboy text on volcanoes,  how the land around morphs after an eruption, from ash to sugarcane to mangrove whistlers  in less than twenty years.

“Sherlock,” he calls, flinging open his laptop, Googling one-handed. 

Dragonflies twenty years after Krakatoa.  And two years after, noctilucent clouds.  Sleep.--JW

*******

Sherlock’s pathways over-flat and through are growing enervated, winding down through the marshes and flats.

“Can I…” says John,”No, let me…”

“What?”  

“Put you to bed.”

“Oh,” says Sherlock, “No, you may not.”

 John takes him by the upper humerus, tugs him down the passageway, and drops him on the bed.  It‘s ridiculously easy. 

(Stand down; down you go, over the edge; it’s a precipice out there; it is.)

 Sherlock looks at him.  His hair’s lightly gilded with summer pollen; his bones have no heft at all.

“What do you expect me to do?”says Sherlock from the bed’s edge.

_Not think about anything except the insides of your eyelids._

_Stay._

_Stop for a second; we may have days, months, years, but stop for minute._

_Lie down._

_Sleep.  (Let nothing catch fire.)_

*******

“He’d been hunting, “ says Sherlock, level and grave. “He’d killed before.”

“Yes, and he won’t do it anymore,” John says.

(Lila W., strangled at 26, wing-shaped bruises round her neck.)

“Thanks to you,” says John.

*******

John unbuttons one gleaming button on Sherlock’s shirt for him, stops, pulls off his own shoes. Sherlock’s ribs rise; his eyelids iridesce in the afternoon light.  The sleep that takes them is the brackish tide on the estuary--out, out with the breeze sifting through the flat.

John dreams of damselflies apple green and blue, over the low places stitching and darning; two planes fused and falling over the North Sea;  blue bees in the Afghan desert; butterflies, the dark Camberwell Beauties, fluttering  over the devastated battlefields  of Europe; to the ruined places of the world the life returning.

**Author's Note:**

> [The British Dragonfly Society](http://british-dragonflies.org.uk/home)
> 
>   
> 
> 
> [Mark Kozelek, “Dragonflies”](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=san96CeHdcE)
> 
>   
> 
> 
> [Inro with dragonfly design from the Victoria and Albert Museum](http://www.vam.ac.uk/users/node/5792)
> 
>   
> 
> 
> [Art Nouveau dragonflies](http://www.bexsimon.com/2012/03/07/dragonflies-and-butterflies-in-art-nouveau/)
> 
>   
> 
> 
> [Symbolist dragonfly pendant, Tadema Gallery, London](http://www.onlinegalleries.com/art-and-antiques/detail/beautiful-symbolist-pendant/97365)
> 
>   
> 
> 
> [Art Nouveau bee fresco](http://artnouveau.pagesperso-orange.fr/img/villes/lahaye/bee%20fresco%20-%20Laan%20Van%20Meerdevoort,%20164-168,%20Den%20Haag_l.jpg)
> 
>   
> 
> 
> [Insects Scared to Death in the Presence of Predator](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2054667/Insects-scared-death-mere-presence-predator.html)
> 
>  
> 
> [Nymphalis antiopa, the Camberwell Beauty, known in America as the Mourning Cloak](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nymphalis_antiopa)

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Anisoptera](https://archiveofourown.org/works/491299) by [dee-light (DraloreShimare)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/DraloreShimare/pseuds/dee-light)




End file.
